In a commercial establishment that provides commercial items (hereinafter simply referred to as an item) to customers in response to the orders from the customers; namely, a commercial establishment that is selling items that need preparation, like a pharmacy selling prescription drugs, when the preparation of an item ordered by a customer is completed, the customer's name or number is called out and the item is handed over to the customer, and therefore, the customers need to wait in the waiting area until they are called. Thus, if customer information relating to the states of the customers who have entered the commercial establishment is generated and managed such that the customer information, particularly, the information necessary to provide customer service, such as the waiting time of each customer, is provided to the staff members, it is possible to provide appropriate customer service efficiently, and this is beneficial for improving the customer satisfaction and streamlining the operation of the commercial establishment.
With regard to such management of the states of the customers who have entered the commercial establishment, it is known conventionally to perform person matching between the images of persons captured when the persons enter the commercial establishment and the images of persons captured when the persons exit the commercial establishment, and when it is determined that a person entering the commercial establishment is identical with a person exiting the commercial establishment, to calculate, based on the time of capture of the image including the person entering the commercial establishment and the time of capture of the image including the person exiting the commercial establishment, an elapsed time from entering to exiting the commercial establishment as a stay duration (see JP07-249138A). It is also known to capture, with cameras, images of customers entering the commercial establishment, customers paying for their purchases and customers exiting the commercial establishment, collect face images extracted form the captured images, and perform person matching based on the face images to associate the images of a same person with one another, to thereby collect information relating to the behaviors of the customers (see JP2002-041770A). Further, a technology is known for displaying various information on a portable terminal device, where the information may include captured images of customers taking a queue ticket from a queue ticket dispensing machine, purposes of visits obtained from input operations performed by the customers at the queue ticket dispensing machine, waiting times of the customers calculated from the times of dispense of the queue ticket, and a state of performance of customer service behaviors (such as speaking to the customer) obtained from input operations performed on portable terminal devices carried by staff members who provide customer services (see JP2009-122871A).
However, the technology disclosed in the aforementioned JP07-249138A only makes it possible to grasp the waiting times of customers who are waiting for the handover of the items or the like in the commercial establishment, and the technology disclosed in JP2002-041770A only makes it possible to roughly grasp the behaviors of the customers, such as revisit of certain customers who have visited the commercial establishment before, based on the collected face images of the customers visiting the commercial establishment, and thus, they could not provide the staff members with sufficient information required for the staff members to provide appropriate customer services.
On the other hand, the technology disclosed in JP2009-122871A provides the staff members with information such as customer images, purposes of visits, waiting times and a state of performance of customer service behaviors (such as speaking to the customer), and thus, the staff members may be able to perform appropriate customer service behaviors based on such information. However, in a case where a customer makes an irregular behavior, such as temporarily exiting the commercial establishment to kill time outside the commercial establishment, the information provided by this technology is not sufficient to enable the staff members to provide appropriate customer services to such a customer.
The present invention is made to solve such prior art problems and a primary object of the present invention is to provide a customer management device, a customer management system and a customer management method which can grasp without fail the states of customers requiring a customer service behavior, to thereby improve the customer satisfaction.